Tim Murtaugh

So, this one bittorrent site got shut down by the FBI, and where the old site was the fibbies have put up their own, uber-red notification page.

I’m not a big torrent user, and, while I think file-sharing services should be able to run un-hampered, and do not believe that movie or music sharing is hurting their respective industries in any way (in fact, I’m among those who believe that sharing technologies will only do good things in the future towards the evolution and democratization of the entertainment industry), I’ve chosen not to care all that much about the issue, since I only have so much RAM, and I’m choosing to care about other things.

That’s probably the longest sentence I’ve ever written.

So, perhaps it’s my low-level interest that leads me to this observation: BoingBoing, Slashdot and Metafilter have all made note of this news, and users on all three sites have commented that if you view the source of the page, you cam tell the FBI used Microsoft Word to generate the page.

BoingBoing: “1) The feds use MS Word for their page designs. Silly.”

Metafilter: “It’s ironic that these people supposedly policing the internet seem to have used Word to make that utterly simple webpage…”

Slashdot: “Sweet mother of God, what an ugly page. View source and it gets even scarier…”

My question is: Who cares, and why are they surprised? (I guess that’s kind of two questions.)

The page in question was likely developed very quickly, they obviously didn’t have a designer on board, so the project as a whole could probably be charitably considered a “slap dash” effort. Do we really expect some FBI administrative assistant to have HTML skills, or even Dreamweaver/FrontPage, at their disposal, much less know how to use it?

Ask anyone without HTML skills (but with MS Office skills) to create an HTML page, they’re going to head straight for Word. It’s what they use and there’s a prominent “Save as Web Page” command right in the file menu.